Latest on the Herculaneum library

TECHNOLOGY WATCH: The Invisible Library. Can digital technology make the Herculaneum scrolls legible after two thousand years? (JOHN SEABROOK, The New Yorker). This is the longest and most thorough article on the Herculaneum scrolls I have ever seen. It describes their background, their discovery, the major events and personalities dealing with them since, and the current state of the question. Find some time to sit down and read it all. I will just quote a bit toward the end:

Brent Seales, denied the scientific glory of being the first to see inside the rolled scrolls, has been focussing on the software side of the problem. If large portions of wrapped scrolls are ever going to be read virtually, the process will have to be automated. You’d need a scroll reader that skims along the surface of each successive fold, looking for characteristic shapes and densities of letters. Seales has been designing a prototype for such software, and he showed it to Delattre recently. “Impressive” was the Frenchman’s opinion. Janko thinks that “clearly the way forward from here is to combine the work Seales is doing with Mocella’s data.”

Such a convergence seemed poised to occur this spring, when Seales, Delattre, and Mocella were set to meet in Grenoble, for another synchrotron session: the software engineer, the papyrologist, the physicist, and a whole week of beam time. (Seales still wasn’t part of the team, but he was coming anyway, to present his virtual-unwrapping software.) At the last minute, though, the team didn’t get the scroll. Only days before the experiment was set to begin, the Institut de France indicated that it could not grant Mocella’s request. No official reason was offered, but the recent publicity about the virtual unwrapping was thought to have caused the institute to reëvaluate the scrolls in terms of intellectual property. Controlling access to the scrolls has always been a form of power.

The institute’s decision was a blow to Delattre. When I saw him not long afterward, in the institute’s library, he still seemed shaken.

This brings the story up to date since this post from January. And see also more recently here and here. Follow the links for many posts going back years and years.